Connecting…choose your own adventure?

Over the past few years we’ve done a lot of research on the best way to get in touch with people. We’ve found that the best way is however the user chooses. By giving customers, clients, partners and prospects the option to connect how they want to, they feel like they get to control the interaction.

We realize there will be people that will never go to our website, follow us on Twitter or join our email list. With that being said some of those same people will join our Facebook page or join our text club or subscribe to the rss feed.  See our join page for individuals where we give people the option on how they connect with The New Radar.

So what does this mean for marketing departments? It means you better have multiple ways to interact with your people and make sure you have all those ways available.  With the world being mobile and on the go and consumers wanting instant gratification, we have found that text messages and video have the highest and fastest open rate.  Just think about how many friends you have on Facebook or how many people you follow on Twitter…do you see ALL of their messages and posts? Not if you get anything else done. How many texts have you gotten that you didn’t read? Probably not too many.

Not every platforms audience is the same, so beware of the frequency and the content you post for each medium.  Know YOUR audience and study their behaviors.  Although there  is a lot of good information out there, take heed when taking the “social media experts” word as gospel because they don’t necessarily know how to talk to and resonate with YOUR people.  The social media space is evolving so rapidly, that what is expert advice today is misinformation tomorrow.  If you’re wise and you want people to actually engage with you, you’ll shift YOUR thinking to talking to your audience instead of talking at them because people, even in a digital world want to be treated like people.    All the social networks, email, mobile messaging, blogs, etc can and have to work in a holistic environment, NOT each independent of the others.  If you stay true to what got people there in the first place and don’t try to please everybody all the time, then you will find that people will come and join…however they want to.